Who Is Ewelina Kawczyńska?
Ewelina Kawczyńska is the CEO and Founder of Impactwithewelina, a Zurich-based storytelling and communications practice working with nonprofit organizations and impact-driven companies. A journalist and communications professional with more than 12 years of international experience, she has worked with leading global media outlets including CNN, Euronews, and the Associated Press, as well as the United Nations. Her work has taken her across eight countries and five languages, covering major world events and documenting stories of people affected by conflict, displacement, and humanitarian crises. Today, she brings that experience into storytelling, media relations, public speaking, and event moderation, helping organizations communicate their work through clear, human-centered narratives.
CEO & Founder, Impactwithewelina | Global Storytelling & Communications | Public Speaking | Media Relations | Humanitarian Communications
The Number Is Never the Whole Story
A nonprofit can report how many people it helped, how much funding it received, or how many programs it delivered. Those numbers matter, but they can still leave the most important part of the story untold: what actually happened to a person whose life was changed by that work?
That question sits at the center of Ewelina Kawczyńska’s work.
Today, as CEO and Founder of Impactwithewelina, she helps nonprofits and impact-driven companies communicate through storytelling and content creation. She also teaches public speaking and moderates events in Zurich, bringing together years of journalism, humanitarian communications, international reporting, and firsthand experience telling stories that carry real human stakes.
Her approach is rooted in something deceptively simple: if an organization wants people to understand its impact, it has to show them the person behind the number.
“It’s not about how many people they helped but it’s about storytelling and tell how they helped someone and how it changed their life.”
That belief gives her current work a clear purpose. She is not simply helping organizations produce more content. She is helping them make their work understandable in human terms.
Learning to Listen Before Telling
Long before Impactwithewelina existed, Ewelina was learning how to find stories in places where the stakes were high.
Her journalism career took her across countries and major media organizations, including CNN, AP, and Euronews. She reported on politics, human rights, sustainability, terrorist attacks, and other difficult subjects. But the skill she carried forward was not simply knowing how to conduct an interview.
It was knowing how to listen.
“It’s not always about asking questions but it’s about listening to the person and make the follow up questions on what they say.”
That distinction has shaped the way she works with people whose stories are difficult to tell. Ewelina recalls interviewing people who had experienced rape, kidnapping, and war. If someone later decided they no longer wanted their story published, she respected that choice.
“For me the most important thing is not to sell the story but the comfort of the person I interview.”
There is a deeper principle behind that statement. Storytelling can create visibility, but the person whose experience created the story should not disappear inside it.
For Ewelina, that ethical responsibility is part of what makes a story worth telling in the first place.
When the Story Found Her at the Ukraine Border
One of the clearest examples of her instincts came when the war in Ukraine began.
Ewelina traveled to the border with her friend Kasia Cera to create an independent documentary. They did not arrive with a fixed subject. After several days, they began noticing something they felt deserved attention: people from around the world were arriving to provide food, transportation, shelter, music, and other forms of support.
The documentary became a story about those volunteers and the human response unfolding at the border. Ewelina and Kasia took their time, paying attention to who wanted to speak and who did not. The experience affected Ewelina deeply, and she recalls needing two weeks afterward to recover from the stories she encountered.
The finished film was later shown at the Global Migration Film Festival in Warsaw.
“Seeing it on the big screen was a feeling I will never forget.”
The documentary also became an unexpected professional turning point. While she was at the border, Ewelina was approached about a communications position with the International Organization for Migration. She applied and was hired, moving from independent journalism into institutional communications at a moment when the world was watching the humanitarian consequences of the war.
What the UN Taught Her About Someone Else’s Voice
Moving into IOM changed the mechanics of storytelling.
Journalism had given Ewelina editorial freedom. Institutional communications required something different: responsibility for representing an organization’s voice accurately, often through a much more complex approval process.
At IOM, she produced 50 videos and 20 stories. Across her broader career, she estimates that she has produced around 80 videos and written approximately 30 stories across countries including the UK, Uganda, Thailand, Kosovo, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland.
The experience taught her that good organizational communication is not about making the communicator the center of the story.
“You need to respect the voice of the organization and speak for it and not for yourself.”
That lesson now matters directly to the work she is building. Her clients may have their own missions, communities, expertise, and reasons for existing. Her role is to help bring those elements into a story that an outside audience can understand without losing what makes the organization itself credible.
For Ewelina, that is where journalism and communications meet.
Building Impactwithewelina Around Stories That Matter
Today, Ewelina is building Impactwithewelina specifically for nonprofits and impact-driven companies. Her goal is to bring the skills she developed through journalism and her work as a UN communications professional into organizations that need to communicate their work with greater clarity and humanity.
The focus is particularly relevant for organizations whose work can be difficult to explain. Humanitarian programs, social initiatives, and purpose-driven companies often have complex outcomes, multiple stakeholders, and large amounts of information competing for attention.
Ewelina sees an opportunity to make that communication more human.
Her own experience across languages and cultures strengthens that work. She has confirmed that speaking with people in their mother tongue often helps her interviews because people are more comfortable expressing themselves in the language they know best.
She is also expanding the same communication expertise into public speaking and event moderation in Zurich. That matters because the ability to communicate clearly does not stop at written content. It extends to the room, the stage, the camera, and the conversation.
The Voice She Had to Find Herself
There is an unexpected personal thread running through all of this.
Ewelina was very shy as a child. Her father taught her that being afraid was acceptable, but that fear did not have to determine what she did next. She began participating in school theater and recitation competitions. By the age of 17 or 18, she discovered that she enjoyed speaking to camera and began considering journalism as a career.
Years later, she would become the person helping other people communicate with confidence.
That progression gives her work another dimension. She knows what it feels like to have something to say and still struggle to say it. She also knows what can happen when someone is finally given the space to tell their story.
“I wanted to help other people if it was a homeless mother in Uganda, victim of human trafficking or a refugee from Ukraine.”
That may be the clearest explanation of what Ewelina Kawczyńska is building now.
Her work is not really about producing more stories. It is about making sure the right person is still visible inside the story.
And sometimes, that person is hidden behind a number.
Ewelina Kawczyńska is the CEO and Founder of Impactwithewelina, a Zurich-based storytelling and communications practice helping nonprofit organizations and impact-driven companies turn complex work into clear, human stories that people can understand and remember. Drawing on more than a decade of international journalism and communications experience, including work with CNN, Euronews, AP, and the United Nations, she also teaches public speaking and moderates events.
